Early detection and bypassing of trivial operations to improve energy efficiency of processors

This paper addresses the issue of improving the energy efficiency of processors by eliminating trivial operations. The paper provides a new classification of trivial operations and quantifies their relative frequency in desktop and embedded applications. It then presents a hardware technique to remove trivial operations as early as at the decode stage of the pipeline to save energy. This paper shows that 13.6% and 8.6% of the instructions are identity-trivial in the selected applications in the SPEC CPU2000 and EEMBC1.1 benchmark suites, respectively. Early detection and elimination of trivial operations reduce the average energy consumption of the core pipeline by 9% and 6%, respectively. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.